Abstract
Awareness of one’s own abilities is of paramount importance in adaptive decision making. Psychotherapeutic theories assume such metacognitive insight is impaired in compulsivity, though this is supported by scant empirical evidence. In this study, we investigate metacognitive abilities in compulsive participants using computational models, where these enable a segregation between metacognitive and perceptual decision making impairments. We examined twenty low-compulsive and twenty high-compulsive participants, recruited from a large population-based sample, and matched for other psychiatric and cognitive dimensions. Hierarchical computational modelling of the participants’ metacognitive abilities on a visual global motion detection paradigm revealed that high-compulsive participants had a reduced metacognitive ability. This impairment was accompanied by a perceptual decision making deficit whereby motion-related evidence was accumulated more slowly in high compulsive participants. Our study shows that the compulsivity spectrum is associated with a reduced ability to monitor one’s own performance, over and above any perceptual decision making difficulties.
Highlights
Awareness of one’s own abilities is of paramount importance in adaptive decision making
We found that compulsivity is related to impairments in metacognitive efficiency, and that this was complemented by an independent perceptual decision making impairment
The stimulus motion orientation, was significantly greater in high compared to low compulsive participants (Fig. 1E; low compulsives: 3.05 degrees ± 0.83; high compulsives: 4.25 ± 2.05; t(36) = −2.42, p = 0.021). This means that high compulsive participants required a stronger motion orientation signal to perform at the same error rate as the low compulsives, indicating a weaker perceptual detection performance
Summary
Awareness of one’s own abilities is of paramount importance in adaptive decision making Psychotherapeutic theories assume such metacognitive insight is impaired in compulsivity, though this is supported by scant empirical evidence. We investigate metacognitive abilities in compulsive participants using computational models, where these enable a segregation between metacognitive and perceptual decision making impairments. Hierarchical computational modelling of the participants’ metacognitive abilities on a visual global motion detection paradigm revealed that high-compulsive participants had a reduced metacognitive ability. This impairment was accompanied by a perceptual decision making deficit whereby motion-related evidence was accumulated more slowly in high compulsive participants. Traditional studies of metacognition using questionnaires[11,14,21,22,23,24,25] or subjective confidence ratings[10,12,13,15] are subject to influences that may mimic a metacognitive impairment, such as systematic response biases in www.nature.com/scientificreports/
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